Sapphire launches Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X

The day has finally arrived when you can buy the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X card that we gave one lucky reader in our Sapphire competition. That means that the card should be winging its way to winner Mark Nicholls now, if it hadn’t been shipped before.

For the rest of us to get the rugged-looking HD 5870 Vapor-X, it looks like we’ll have stump up £378.99 (inc VAT). We bet Mark’s feeling pretty smug about now!

Unlike previous Vapor-X graphics cards, the HD 5870 is pre-overclocked. Sapphire insists that this doesn’t make the card a Toxic or Atomic card, but we’d always thought that Vapor-X meant that cards come at stock speeds but with the excellent Vapor-X cooler.

The GPU clock has been bumped up from the usual 850MHz to 870MHz and the 1GB of GDDR5 memory from 1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective) to 1.25GHz (5GHz effective). This overclock is pretty conservative 2-4 per cent increase, but with the Vapor-X cooler and a decent overclocking tool, perhaps this card will be the first HD 5870 to break the 1GHz GPU barrier.

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We’ll have to wait till we can find time with our test rigs to tell, but in the meantime, let us know your thoughts about the HD 5870 Vapor-X in the forums.